We need to talk about the human heart. Confusion abounds.

Perhaps we should start with the Scriptures. The Hebrew word rendered heart in English Bibles is , which well transliterate 鉛擢恢 (lv would also work).

晦擢恢 is all over the Hebrew Bible. I mean all over.

Its in perhaps the defining passage(s) of the Hebrew Scriptures, the 廩廣 (Shema):

Hear, Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart (岼峺岼峺屮) and with all your being and with all your might.[1]

Earlier, in Genesis 20, Abimelech protests to God that he had acted with respect to Sarah from a pure heart, and God agrees that he acted 岼廬峺崗 岼峺岼峺, with a pure heart (Alter), in the integrity of your heart (ESV), with a clear conscience (NIV). Solomon enjoins his child in Proverbs 4 to listen to my words, to guard them within your heart (岼峺峩崕峺) (Alters translation).

This could go on for a while. 晦擢恢 peppers the Pentateuch. And the OT historical books. And Psalms. And Proverbs. Oh, and the prophets. It shows up almost 600 times, roughly every 40 verses. Around once every chapter and a half, on average. Include the closely related lebab in the count and youre right at once per chapter.

晦擢恢 is A Thing.

Heres the deal, though: we tend to misunderstand these biblical passages because we have a truncated view of what 鉛擢恢 involves. We read the Old Testament through contemporary eyes: we think of the heart as, fundamentally, the seat of feeling and emotion, of desire and will, and this is crucial not as the seat of thought and rationality, of deliberation and judgment.

Consider Jeremiah 17:9:

More crooked the heart than all things,

it is grievously ill and who can fathom it?[2]

Some folks conclude from this that the deepest problem besetting the human condition is our emotions, our desires, or (most misleadingly) our feelings. This makes sense, of course, if the heart is simply the seat of those sorts of things.

But this view of 鉛擢恢 is, to be blunt, just wrong. It is wrong because it demands a truncated picture of the human heart. 晦擢恢 involves feelings, emotion, desire, yes. But, equally, and just as fundamentally, 鉛擢恢 involves thought, judgment, understanding, rationality. 晦擢恢 includes the mind.

Commenting on Deuteronomy 6, Robert Alter mentions this explicitly:

The heart is the seat of understanding in biblical physiology, but it is also associated with feelings.[3]

Notice that the framing idea for Alter is understanding. Feelings are an also.

Its not just Alter. The inclusion of the mind within our 鉛擢恢 is just a commonplace among Hebrew scholars. In part, this is because other Semitic languages share this feature in common: the various but linguistically interconnected words for heart refer synecdochically to whole selves, including all of our core faculties like desire, will, emotion, and you guessed it mind. Indeed, English Bibles often translate a cognate of 鉛擢恢 in 1 Samuel 9:20 using mind.

But in larger part scholars recognize this because its sorta obvious if you actually pay attention to how the Scriptures use 鉛擢恢.

Take Psalm 119:11, in which the Psalmist insists:

I have stored up your word in my heart.

Storing up the word of God is no doubt more than an intellectual feat, but it surely isnt less than intellectual. One uses ones mind, and other parts of oneself as well, to store up Gods word. So the Psalmist recognizes that the heart is not just a seat of feelings. It is also the seat of the intellect. Likewise Proverbs 4:20-27. And on the list could go. (Theres a related point to make about the Old Testament idea of remembering, which involves more than the mind, but not less.)

These examples are typical of 鉛擢恢 in the Old Testament. The human faculty most often clearly in view when the Old Testament deploys 鉛擢恢 is the mind.[4] In other words, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, your mind is a fundamental part of your heart.

Hearts are, as it were, minded.

And yet, rarely have I seen contemporary discussions of, for example, Jeremiah 17 include a conversation about the deceitfulness of the mind. This is no doubt facilitated by translations like the ESV, which seemingly contrast mind and heart in Jeremiah 17:10. But mind is an at best controversial translation of 岼崋峺峭廬 in verse 10. Alter, for example, renders this conscience. Jeremiah is getting at ones inner parts. The words close cousins often refer to literal kidneys! Regardless, Jeremiah is using 鉛擢恢 in v. 9 to refer to a persons whole self, just as the Psalmist and others do. Just as Hebrew intends.

Anyway, if I had to pick one aspect of the cultural zeitgeist that irks me the most, it would be the bifurcation of mind and heart, between head and gut. Its a plague. A pox on our house. And it is everywhere.

I see the consequences of this cultural lie every semester in my students. It leads them to think that getting in touch with their deepest desires is the way to a fulfilled life. It makes them think self-control is a vice rather than a fruit of the Spirit. It leads them to .

I can understand the instinct here. There is a tradition one that in some ways has become more powerful as people have endeavored to correct it according to which the deepest, most important the essential aspect of humanity is our mind, our intellect. This tradition is no doubt false. We are more than minds!

To solve this problem, many people want to insist on the importance of feeling, of emotion, desire, and other more obviously embodied forms of human experience. Often, folks will try to do this by insisting that we ought to elevate the heart. In some sense, I applaud this move. These folks, in other words, want to elevate emotion and desire and such. And that is a needed correction.

The problem is that these same folks often fail to deal with the contemporary misunderstanding of the heart as not involving the mind. (Perhaps Ill say more about this move in a future post.)

We are left, therefore, with a fundamental distinction, perhaps even opposition, between mind on the one hand and emotion, will, desire on the other. As if these two aspects of the self operate independently.[5] In English, like in Hebrew, heart insists on picking out our deepest self. And as a result, our minds are jettisoned as constitutive of who we are. We become, in our deepest parts, a bundle of feelings and desire. No wonder it then becomes difficult, when feeling and knowledge conflict, to act on anything other than feeling. In other words, down this path lies expressive individualism in its Romantic form.

The solution is to return to the biblical picture, contained so clearly in 鉛擢恢: we should mind our hearts.

We must reintroduce the mind into the conversations about the heart. If the heart is our deepest self, minding our hearts reintegrates anthropology. We position ourselves to appreciate that we are more than minds, but not less. We neednt choose between mind and emotion or desire or will. These things are interconnected; they affect one another; they collectively make us who we are. Just as it is wrong to expel the mind from the heart, so it is wrong to think the mind is all there is to the heart.

If we mind our hearts if we situate the mind within the heart, as one but only one of its fundamental faculties we will be better able to mind our hearts in a different sense: to tend to them, care for them, cultivate them. Or, maybe better, we will be better able to participate with God as He molds and shapes our hearts further into the Image of His Son.

Consider: minding the heart changes the way we ought to think about internal conflict. Mind and emotion or desire can both go wrong. Its not that one is trustworthy and the other not. Its that sometimes its one that goes awry, sometimes the other. Sometimes its both! When mind and emotion or desire conflict, our heart is at odds with itself. Our truest, deepest self is a divided heart. Whether our emotions or our mind ought to win the day cannot, then, be settled just by judging which is deeper or more essential. We must discern which aspect of ourselves if any aspect at all! is responding adequately to the Truth, to God and His World.

Mind your heart, so you can mind your heart.

Notes

[1] This is Robert Alters translation in The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Vol. 1 (Norton, 2019).

[2] Alters translation. The ESV renders this verse, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? For the reasons Alter gives, I prefer his rendering.

[3] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Vol. 1, p. 641.

[4] I talk about this a bit further in Chapter 2 of .

[5] More nerdily, this move is fundamentally an embrace of the psychological tradition initiated by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hes a prominent player in the on , and someone to whom well return. In particular, he was way out ahead of in thinking that humans are constructed from .

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